This invention relates to infant care equipment, such as incubators, and, more particularly, to a mechanism for adjusting the angular position of infant care equipment.
There is, of course, a need in the care for infants, to place the infant at an angular position, either with the head raised or the feet raised in order to create a particular desired environment for the infant, i.e. the Trendelenberg and Fowler positions. Current incubators have various means of providing that tilt to the infant, one of which is shown and described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,734,945 and which provides a mechanism within the incubator that tilts the bed or platform on which the infant is positioned.
In the current tilt mechanisms, however, much of the actual mechanism is inside the infant incubator and therefore takes up room that otherwise may be used for other purposes. Such mechanisms are placed underneath the infant bed within the incubator and include various means of operating the mechanisms from outside the incubator. As a further problem, when the infant bed itself is elevated, a portion of the infant is thereby raised up from the normal position within the incubator and access to the infant itself is thus impeded when the user opens the front door to attend to the infant. In addition, since some tilting mechanisms actually operate through or directly adjacent the front door, the operation of the door itself may be compromised.